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Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 136]
Binoy Kampmark: The Cuban Economic Crisis
Thursday, 16 September 2010, 9:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Over one million state workers will have to relocate to the private sector, according to the Cuban authorities. The drive to self-employment and self-sufficiency will become the new ideological mission of the Castro regime. The economy is groaning ... More >>
Qurans, Commemorations and Ground Zero
Monday, 13 September 2010, 11:32 am | Binoy Kampmark
The tension on the site of ‘Ground Zero’, New York’s historical wound that refuses to heal, becomes more tense with each year. There is still no monument to the slain. The Cordoba Initiative, which ‘seeks to actively promote engagement ... More >>
Tony Blair Speaks: The New Labour Journey
Friday, 10 September 2010, 3:55 pm | Binoy Kampmark
So former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has penned a personal tale. How apt that it should come out now, what with the Polanski dramatisation of Robert Harris’ The Ghost Writer , itself a narrative constructed on a former British prime minister ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Amongst The Gnomes of Zürich
Thursday, 9 September 2010, 1:40 pm | Binoy Kampmark
When a population can be guaranteed to be more extreme than its government, democracy has become a majoritarian excess. Switzerland, a country so conservative it attracts both its keen admirers and passionate loathers, is surely such an example. It imports ... More >>
Sorrows of Cricket: Pakistan & the Fall of a Game
Wednesday, 8 September 2010, 6:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark
They are coming out at a rate so regular it has become cruelly banal. Every catch dropped by a Pakistani player; every particularly stroke that might be deemed errant in any other context will now be considered suspect. Paranoia has been given a good ... More >>
Australia: Panicking Over Minority Government
Sunday, 29 August 2010, 12:59 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The use of the term ‘hung parliament’ says it all. States using the Westminster system regard it as a calamity and undeserved form of punishment: a major party without the votes to govern on their own needs the support of minor parties and independents. More >>
Monash University and Commemorative Kitsch
Sunday, 22 August 2010, 8:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Members of university officialdom across the globe feel they have to do it. Bring out the cameras, honour distinguished alumni with an assortment of awards and perks, and broadcast hideous, commercially-styled films for a dumbstruck audience. Give ... More >>
Deluged and Drowning: The Pakistan Disaster
Saturday, 21 August 2010, 2:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Much in what happens in political life is often inexplicable. Events often seem to rhyme to the tune of the absurd, egged on by the inexorable march of folly. And so, even as Pakistan is drowning, the attempt to deal with the insurgents continues. ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Using Psychic powers in Policing
Monday, 16 August 2010, 5:27 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Where does the role of the psychic lie in policing? The secular, rationalist follower of hard facts and evidentiary reason might well question their very existence, let alone value. But moments of crisis can increase the emphasis on faith and desires ... More >>
Remembering the Kursk
Saturday, 14 August 2010, 2:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A moment to ponder: the cruel deaths of 118 men, who perished with their nuclear submarine ten years ago during naval exercises in the Barents Sea. The tragedy was compounded by that sclerotic response typical of bureaucracies terrified of openness ... More >>
Conflict Diamonds and the Campbell Affair
Thursday, 12 August 2010, 4:21 pm | Binoy Kampmark
One should keep an eye out for the provenance of precious stones. At least, that’s the message that has been cropping up in recent times with the war crimes trial of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor in The Hague. Super model Naomi Campbell is ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The sexiness of humanitarian aid
Monday, 9 August 2010, 10:41 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The journey to work was characterised by cold winds, the usual dreary outfits of a dour morning scene in Melbourne, embellished by ‘Antarctic’ fittings. But as the sun peaked briefly and the traffic lights were about to turn, two bright women, ... More >>
Australian Packaging and the Smoker’s Party
Saturday, 7 August 2010, 3:52 pm | Binoy Kampmark
So, the wheels of history are moving back as the Australian election is heating up. What has made little impact is the startling announcement by a retail association to effectively pack a pro-smoking measure. The Labor government has insisted that ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: The Australian Federal Elections
Wednesday, 4 August 2010, 12:08 am | Binoy Kampmark
Another Australian election looms, and the incumbent government is intent on ritually disembowelling itself. Having deposed its own prime minister, the first Labor government to defeat the conservative Coalition since it was bundled out of office in 1996, ... More >>
Farewell the Netherlands: Leaving Afghanistan
Monday, 2 August 2010, 10:11 pm | Binoy Kampmark
One of the more accomplished forces in a rather unaccomplished conflict is leaving Afghanistan. The Taliban are gleeful and have even proven congratulatory – another force bites the dust in the graveyard of empires. ‘We would like to offer the citizens ... More >>
Blasting Pakistan: David Cameron in India
Friday, 30 July 2010, 4:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There was little doubt that the British Prime Minister David Cameron was playing to his audience. Pakistan was the convenient target of opprobrium before a gathering at the IT major Infosys campus in Bangalore. ‘We cannot tolerate in any sense the ... More >>
The Absurd in Action: Being Burnt by the Sun
Friday, 30 July 2010, 2:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In his second notebook, Albert Camus makes reference to the nature of love as a palliative to the absurd. In Burnt by The Sun 2: Exodus , Nikita Mikhalkov continues his epic story he began in Burnt by the Sun (1994) featuring the travails of General Kotov, ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: You’ve been Wikileaked
Wednesday, 28 July 2010, 11:50 am | Binoy Kampmark
Wikileaks is proving to be a gem of surveillance and discovery. Having exposed an assortment of brutalities, censorship farces, and government duplicity since its inception, the organisation has managed several information coups over the last few ... More >>
Russians, Babies and James Rabbitt’s The Clinic
Tuesday, 27 July 2010, 7:47 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The sea of drab grey and black sloshes back and forth before the cinema doors open. Another film event is promised at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which has already made it into the news because of the banning of Bruce LaBruce’s LA ... More >>
Shrill Busy-bodies and David Cameron’s Big Society
Tuesday, 27 July 2010, 7:28 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Could it be right? A Tory Prime Minister unveiling visions of a ‘Big Society’ that would redistribute power and initiative from ‘elites’ to the broader community or ‘the man and woman on the street’? Society had been the elephantine target ... More >>
